From Sourcers to CxOs: Professionals Want Better Recruiting Analytics

Mike Roberts January 7, 2016

Information is a currency that holds different values for every company—even each department.

For instance, telling your superior the top source of hire for 2015 was your career site could be virtually meaningless if that statement is based purely on assumptions rather than data. In contrast, if you presented that insight with the support of conversion rates broken down by hiring source, then the discussion would hold completely different weight.

Subjectivity has riddled the recruiting function for far too long, although that all seems to be changing—and fast. General awareness of the power of data, coupled with the availability of easy-to-deploy recruiting analytics tools is accelerating the trend toward data-driven recruiting. Widespread change has not yet happened, but things seem to be moving in the right direction.

In late 2015, we conducted a study with Beamery on this topic, surveying almost 300 professionals. The data revealed that a majority of respondents regarded analytics as very important, but were dissatisfied with their current mix of performance management tools. This indicates transformation is on the horizon. In this post, we will examine the data more in depth.

Recruiting Analytics Are A Priority Across the Board

From sourcers to CxOs, a majority of respondents in every job role within or affected by the talent acquisition function listed recruiting analytics as highly important. Let’s inspect why that is.

Sourcers and recruiters greatly benefit from recruiting analytics—it makes sense that they see them as highly important. Used effectively, recruiting analytics can monitor and control performance as well as facilitate the identification of areas for improvement. From a strategic recruiting perspective, a similar story can be told for talent acquisition leaders.

It’s interesting to see large numbers of hiring managers and CxOs view recruiting analytics as highly important. Studies have shown that although these groups may not typically impact the sourcing and recruiting aspects of talent acquisition, they tend to desire more visibility into the health of processes. Recruiting metrics like time to fill and quality of hire can be of great significance to them.

Current Performance Management Tools Aren’t Sufficient

It’s worth mentioning that analytics means different things to different people. Most data experts reserve the true meaning of analytics for reference to data analysis involving statistical modeling, but for the sake of this study it is discussed within the general context of programs for monitoring and analyzing recruiting performance.

Some companies have created their own recruiting analytics capabilities with spreadsheets, maybe involving homegrown macros, in addition to other manual methods. Others have adopted next-generation recruiting analytics tools. These tools are made to streamline data collection from disparate sources, centralize data, and enable analysis. Such tools are often accompanied by data visualization capabilities.

That said, a far lower number of talent acquisition teams are using next-generation recruiting analytics to support their current performance management efforts. Widespread adoption of next-gen tools just hasn’t happened yet. It is far more likely teams are using a mix of manual and ad-hoc methods, creating reports as needed, and as a result acting in very reactive ways.

From our perspective, the lack of automation and analysis tools is a main driver behind such widespread performance management dissatisfaction across roles shown in the data point above.

What to Make of These Insufficiencies and Priorities

As mentioned at the beginning of this article, this juxtaposition of the perception that recruiting analytics are highly important with the fact that too many professionals are dissatisfied with their current performance management setup is indicative that change is coming.

It won’t be long before more companies start adopting dedicated recruiting analytics tools and software, and we will see both importance and satisfaction numbers start to align. A similar trend happened in sales as well as marketing not all that long ago, and those functions cannot effectively operate today without the support of analytics.

If information is, in fact, a currency within organizations, then how valuable is yours? In answering that question, you might just realize there’s a misalignment between your desire for actionable intelligence and your ability to generate it.

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